From Publishers Weekly
Gay believes that the Victorian bourgeoisie, and 19th-century Europe's middle classes generally, were much more introspective and prone to self-exploration than is commonly assumed. Using the autobiographies or memoirs of John Stuart Mill, George Sand, Goethe, Edmund Gosse and Thomas Carlyle, he charts a passion for self-scrutiny that made public these writers' inner struggles with belief, faith and emotion. His survey of private letters and diaries subverts the notion that Victorians regarded the male as coolly reasoning and the female as an emotional being. Yale history professor emeritus Gay (The Enlightenment) argues that Dickens, Henry James, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy enlarged the inner domain, while Eugene Sue, French serial novelist, and Karl May, German producer of potboilers, also nourished middle-class fantasies and helped shape identities. Among painters, he spotlights individualists such as Van Gogh, Courbet, James Ensor and Caspar David Friedrich, who gave fresh impetus to self-revelation. This fourth volume in Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud is a scholarly yet engrossing, enormously rich exploration of 19th-century self-discovery.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The fourth volume of Gay's "The Bourgeois Experience" (after Education of the Senses, Oxford Univ. Pr., 1984; The Tender Passion, LJ 2/15/86; and The Cultivation of Hatred, LJ 9/1/93) focuses on the 19th-century bourgeois preoccupation with the self. The author examines "the democratization of romantic love, the fashion for autobiography, biography, history, and imaginative fiction, the claims of art and music as aids to introspection," as well as the explosion of diary keeping and letter writing to explore the century's infatuation with "the more or less naked heart." This he puts into various contexts?reactions against 18th-century rationalism, increasing acceptance of romantic attitudes, the history and ambivalent nature of autobiography and diary keeping, and so on. Although much of this is familiar, Gay's discussions of specifics (especially in German literature and art) individualize and enliven his themes. A book to be read more for the measured unfolding of its magisterial perspectives than for groundbreaking or flashy revaluations; recommended for academic and larger public libraries.?Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
